


A Long Way

by Dragonflies_and_Katydids



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Past Relationship(s), Slight Canon Divergence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-10
Updated: 2015-08-10
Packaged: 2018-04-13 21:55:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4538850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dragonflies_and_Katydids/pseuds/Dragonflies_and_Katydids
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are some things Cullen wants to say to Samson before his execution.</p>
<p>(I realize that executing Samson isn't actually an option, in-game, which is the source of the tag for canon divergence.)</p>
<p>Please read the tags!  This is a sorry-not-sorry story.  I want to say sorry, but if I really was, I wouldn't be posting it, so...sorry.  But not really.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Long Way

**Author's Note:**

> And I know a father who had a son  
> He longed to tell him all the reasons for the things he'd done  
> He came a long way just to explain  
> He kissed his boy as he lay sleeping  
> Then he turned around and headed home again
> 
> Paul Simon, "Slip Slidin' Away"

The trial is brief and its conclusion should leave him satisfied, even if not exactly pleased, but as the Inquisitor hands down the judgment, all Cullen feels is the same rage he's felt since he first learned who was leading the Red Templars. It chokes him until he can hardly look at Samson where he kneels before the throne, and when the trial is done, Cullen allows the guards to escort their prisoner away without his help. His honor may be battered, but he hasn't yet fallen low enough to beat a man who can't defend himself. He doesn't _want_ to fall that low, and so he returns to his office rather than follow his soldiers down to the cells.

Attempting to snuff that rage with the dull mundanity of paperwork is about as effective as attempting to extinguish a true fire with those same papers. Every ridiculous request is fuel, and every delayed requisition serves as a bellows to bring the coals to white heat. Outside his office, the day is passing, but the only thing Cullen is aware of is the anger curling inside him.

If anyone were foolish enough to ask, he could explain only the most superficial parts of that rage, the parts that are easy to understand and accept: a commander's concern for his troops, and a good man's concern for the suffering of others. What he can't explain--won't explain--is that the rage is more than those, that its roots burrow down into places inside him that he doesn't want to admit exist.

His refusal to acknowledge the source doesn't change anything, and the rage becomes a living thing, spreading through him like ivy overtaking a wall, destroying by slow degrees until he finds himself standing in Skyhold's cellar, staring at the guard left on duty by the cells. The guard is staring back, clearly perplexed by this midnight visit from her commander, but she gives him a crisp salute in spite of the hour and doesn't question him when he sends her away.

Inside the dungeon, shielded lanterns burn by the door and beside each cell, lighting the area with an unwavering light even with the stiff breeze from the hole in the floor. Samson's cell is the last one on the left, almost over the pit; none of the others are currently occupied. Cullen's boots echo in the space, loud and hollow.

Despite that, and despite the execution that is now only hours away, Samson appears to be asleep when Cullen steps up to the bars of his cell. He's on his side, facing away from Cullen, and the bones of his spine and ribs are visible where the prisoner's tunic has ridden up. If he's only feigning sleep, he's doing an excellent job of it: his back rises and falls in shallow, steady breaths, and he doesn't even twitch at the dull ring as Cullen squeezes his gauntleted fists around the bars.

Cullen could have claimed the guard's keys when he claimed her watch, entered the cell and woken Samson with a shake or a kick, except that he's not sure what he might do if he could actually put his hands on Samson right now. Too many possibilities, from the cruel to the pathetic, and he has no desire to be the man who would do any of them.

Now that he's here, the senselessness of it breaks through the rage, cracking it open so that he can no longer ignore the thing at its heart. What purpose does this midnight visit serve? What can he say that the Inquisitor didn't say already, that Samson's own conscience shouldn't have said a thousand times? There's no lecture Cullen can deliver, no impassioned speech he can make that will change Samson's choices. All he has are questions, every one of them impossible.

_"Why did you abandon everything we stood for?"_

Cullen remembers the man he met when he first came to Kirkwall, the templar willing to risk his position--not to mention his supply of lyrium--to smuggle letters for a mage. Samson was harsh and hard, but never cruel, never thoughtless. It would be easier if he had been, if either of them could hide behind even so flimsy an excuse as, "I didn't think about the consequences."

Cullen remembers the man willing to beg in Kirkwall's sewers rather than give in to Meredith, the man who risked death and worse because he believed so passionately in his cause that everything else was secondary. That Corypheus named his general's sword Certainty is so painfully appropriate it makes Cullen ill.

_"Why did you prove them right?"_

When Samson was expelled from the Order, plenty of templars were happy to court Meredith's favor by speaking ill of their former comrade. It had been a fine line to walk, but Cullen learned how to quell those conversations without undermining Meredith's commands.

"Do you really feel so inadequate," he would ask, one eyebrow raised, "that you must abuse a man who isn't here to defend himself?"

In more private moments, when he could speak to Meredith without fear of appearing insubordinate, he would campaign for Samson in a dozen subtle and unsubtle ways. He was a good templar, Cullen would say. A good man, who made a mistake. He carried love letters, not escape plans, not blood magic rituals or the Order's secrets.

Whatever words Cullen used in any given moment, they always came back to this: "I trust him."

_"I kept faith with you,"_ he wants to shout at Samson. _"Why couldn't you keep faith with me?"_

It's a child's protest, and he knows it. What's happened is far beyond him, and what Samson did was never about Cullen. That's what hurts more than all the rest, deep in the most selfish corner of his heart, and that's the real wellspring of his rage: "I was yours, and you betrayed me."

His first evening in the Gallows is burned into Cullen's mind, the pain of Kinloch Hold still a gaping wound, not the aching scar it is now. He remembers standing in the doorway to his new room, wary and angry and hurting, until the strange templar sitting on the other bed looked up at him with cheerful lechery, and said, "Well, at least they sent me a handsome one this time."

In the cold of Skyhold's cell, Samson's arms are curled around his chest to conserve what little heat his wasted body can produce. One of his hands rests on his upper arm, loose fingers visible in the lantern light. He's too far away to see clearly, but Cullen doesn't need to see to know the calluses and scars that mark the skin. What new scars would he find, if they had better light and kinder circumstances?

Because he remembers those hands, touching him in the darkness. Most often to bring pleasure, but sometimes also to stop the pain, rough fingers stroking sweaty hair back from his forehead while an equally rough voice murmured his name and called him back from the memories. Whatever passed between them in the night, pain or pleasure or both, they never spoke of it in daylight, and Samson never turned either into a weapon against him.

Until Samson was caught with Maddox's letter, and Cullen had to learn how to save himself from his memories.

His lips remain closed, but that doesn't erase the words from his mind: _"Why did you do this to me?"_

Every other question comes down to that one, and he wouldn't trust any answer he was given, so he rests his forehead against the bars and watches Samson breathe for a long time.

###

The stones are cold, and every part of his body aches, the lingering traces of red lyrium screaming inside him louder than uncorrupted lyrium ever did. There's a sort of logic to that, that the greater power comes with a greater price, but Samson doesn't care about logic right now. He cares about the pain, and the cold, and the axe that will solve both problems at dawn.

At the other end of the dungeon, the bar across the door is lifted, and Samson's eyes pop open. He knows it isn't time yet, and it's not as if he expects any visitors, not after he scorned their offer of a mother to pray with him in his last hours. He's spent most of the last decade fighting against the Chantry; why would anyone expect him to take comfort in its platitudes now?

A sigh from the doorway, and Samson squeezes his eyes closed again, glad he's facing the wall. He wouldn't have thought, after all these years, that he could recognize Cullen by his sigh or by his footsteps, but it turns out those memories remain. It's not a pleasant realization, though at least it gives him enough warning to feign sleep convincingly.

There's the sound of metal hitting metal, quickly muffled, and then nothing. No way to know what Cullen has come for. That he's come in the middle of the night is ominous, and yet, what can he hope to accomplish that the Inquisitor's executioner won't do tomorrow? Is he here for a more personal revenge, to exorcise his own demons by hurting Samson? As if he can do anything more painful than what the lyrium is doing already.

The silence stretches out, unbroken by the sound of a key in the cell's door. Unbroken by any sound except Cullen's breathing, and the occasional clink as the wind blows his coat against the bars, and Samson gradually realizes that Cullen isn't here for anything so simple as a beating.

Samson wonders what he would see, if he turned over. The same rage he saw this morning at the trial? Triumph, perhaps? Either of those would be preferable to pity, or sanctimonious condemnation.

In the Gallows, they had shared a bed only on rare occasions in winter; a templar's cot was barely comfortable for one person, much less two grown men, and it was far more common for them to sleep with the width of the room between them, no matter what they did before they slept. Regardless of the distance between them, Samson learned the way Cullen's breathing changed when he was caught in a nightmare, and that subtle shift would wake him every time. It's the same change he hears now from where Cullen stands outside his cell, each breath coming strained and too quick.

In Kirkwall, Samson would touch him, call his name, try to help him fight whatever remnants of the demon lingered in his head. Sometimes Cullen would wake, and sometimes he would only roll over and sink into more peaceful dreams, but either way, his breathing would ease as Kinloch Hold faded back into the past where it belonged.

There's no comfort Samson can offer now, not for either of them, and it makes him angry.

The last of the red lyrium inside him flares with his anger, and for a second, he's powerful again, a whole person and not a broken, discarded weapon. He wants to leap to his feet, shout at Cullen until he takes his pity or his judgment elsewhere. What Samson wanted was justice for the men and women the Chantry abandoned--men and women Cullen abandoned--and he refuses to apologize for that.

Then the anger fades, and with it that feeling of power. He _is_ a broken weapon, after all. Why pretend otherwise? And however noble his intentions, the result is this cell, and the condemnation of a man who would have died for him, once upon a time. A man he would have died for, without hesitation.

Outside the cell, Cullen sighs faintly, and it's only Samson's imagination that he can feel it against the back of his neck. There's another soft clang as something metal connects with the cage bars, and then Cullen is walking away, the same heavy tread as before, and Samson discovers that there is, in fact, pain worse than the lyrium.

He opens his mouth to call out, brings one hand down to the floor to roll himself over, but then he hesitates. What can he say that will change anything now? They are templars and warriors, and they have always weighed others by their deeds rather than their words. They have always weighed _themselves_ by their deeds, and Samson's need no explanation.

He's too tired for absolution, for the effort required to win it.

The door closes heavily, the bar on the other side settling into place. Samson tucks his arm back against his body, and waits for the dawn.


End file.
